


negative liberty

by Anonymous



Category: DCU, Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Court of Owls, Dick Grayson is Ric Grayson, Gen, Reconciliation, but like people apologizing to him and not vice versa
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:41:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 14,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22618057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Dick says, "I know. I know. Iknowwhat I used to say, but I'm so sick of it. I'm so sick of having to change, just so everyone else can just pretend that nothing ever happened."Dick gets his memories back. It goes about as well as you'd expect.
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Damian Wayne, William Cobb (DCU) & Dick Grayson
Comments: 35
Kudos: 316
Collections: Anonymous





	1. prologue | what a weight to live under

**Author's Note:**

> so like what you NEED to know for this fic is basically nw #66 :  
> \- the court's responsible for dick not getting his memories back  
> \- at some point ric lit all of his nightwing gear on fire and some cops found it and they're the nightwings now (thats more next ch but w/e)  
> \- william cobb gave him goggles!!! which act as "synaptic receptors" (v v v big suspension of disbelief) that implant fake memories into ric's brain  
> \- the fake memories warp his real, buried memories of training w batman into ones where he was trained as a talon and that’s what this first chapter is  
> \- so the goggles restore and then block his old memories

**_i._ **

“There’s someone here for you.”

Richard Grayson is going to be ten on Thursday. He has a rough, brown policeman’s coat over his shoulders that he can feel scratching off the coarse glitter of his stagewear, raking his skin off with it. It’s so heavy it makes his hands feel like weights. When he tried to push it up he just got red all up the corduroy and stained it bad.

There is a lump in his throat. He tries to explain. “I don’t—” he bites down on his tongue, on the salt from his tears. “I don’t— _have_ anybody.”

The policeman glances down at him dismissively, dark eyebrows like caterpillars crawling up his big white face. “I don’t know what to tell you, kid,” he says, like it doesn’t matter, all sandpaper-voiced, “ _Some_ body’s here. Blood relative.”

Richard stops in his tracks, looks down at the ground. It’s dirt. He swallows but the lump doesn’t go away, it just grows until he can barely speak. He points at the big tent, its striped nylon billowing in the wind, hollowed out from the last flush of the audience. “All my family’s—” his voice trembles, “all my blood is in there.” 

Leaching into the wet, dark ground. 

The policeman pauses for a moment, clicks his teeth, looks at him sharply. Then he starts moving forward again, pulling Richard by the wrist, blood smearing onto his big fingertips.

_**ii.** _

“I’m so very sorry, Richard.” Big white hands on both his cheeks. Just like his dad used to. Forehead pressed against his. “I got here as soon as I could.”

His grandfather is tall and soft and brown-eyed and he looks so much like John Grayson that Richard wants to throw up. He doesn’t. He just stands there in the pelting January wind until his eyes feel raw from the cold and the hot tears and his grandfather scoops him up. He buries his face in the man’s shoulder, whose coat isn’t scratchy like the policeman’s so he curls his fingers tight into it and tries to make himself breathe right. He smells like camphor, like cashmere, like gray tea. 

His grandfather’s murmuring something to the policeman, rubbing circles up Richard’s back all the while, and between the wind and the peacoat he only catches the end of it: “—taking him _home_ now, officer.”

“Home?” whispers Richard, the words a half-breath that his grandfather must only catch because he says it in the crook of his neck; the man shifts, grip tightening around him. His eyes burn star-hot. “I don’t, I don’t want to see the trailer, I don’t want to, I don—”

“Shush,” soothes his grandfather, pressing his chin into the crown of Richard’s head, a weight. 

**_iii._ **

“Again.”

An inch off of the carotid. 

“Again.”

A millimeter. 

“Again.”

Richard hesitates. 

Grandfather is beside him in a second, crouching, his face a hair’s breadth away from Richard’s cheek, and Richard fights the urge to flinch away—unbecoming. Instead, he closes his eyes. “I was close.”

“Yes,” agrees Cobb, forcefully, “you were, yet you could have been closer still. So throw.”

“But—”

“ _Throw_. Now.”

Richard does. He knows it meets the carotid because of the way that the Talon’s whole chest jerks, the rush of black blood, the way it arcs into the air and splatters across his and Cobb’s faces, their feet. 

Grandfather pats his cheek approvingly with the back of his hand before he draws himself to his feet. “Now retrieve them.”

Richard obliges then too, walking over to the Talon to pluck the gold knives out of its chest. The second and third knife slide out like butter, but he has to brace both of his hands and crouch to lever out his first blade, which is stuck in the hard bone of the Talon’s ribs. He must have used more force in this one. Chips of hard, wet bone slide sluggishly off of the gold as he holds it up to Cobb for approval. 

Grandfather nods, lips quirked up, and he catches the wet knives between his fingers effortlessly when Richard throws them back. “Your aim needs work. But your arm is as excellent as always.”

Richard bites back a grin, keeps his back away from his grandfather so he doesn’t show it. There’s no place for pride in training. Instead, he kicks the steel toe of his boot into the growing pool of black shining under the Talon’s dead weight. “...He had a lot of blood this time,” he observes, trying not to preen. 

“It,” corrects Cobb. “Not he.”

Cobb corrects him a lot. Richard makes a lot of mistakes. 

But he’s feeling brave—bold—today, so, “Pedant,” he shoots back, peeling up the Talon’s black mask to see who he skewered this time. Cobb is partial to using the older Talons in training, always says that they have to serve _some_ purpose and that they’re hardly serviceable after being iced for so long. 

It’s not realistic, though. The Talons wake up and warm themselves after they revive. Most people won’t. Still, black blood is easier to remove from the black training uniforms than red, and if Richard can force a blade through an organism strengthened by electrum and hardened by centuries of freezing, then he’ll have no problems breaking an unaltered human’s soft skin.

It still makes him uneasy. This is a person. When Richard completes his training and is chosen to be the Court’s champion—mere years from now, according to Cobb and the heavy, hushed murmurs of the Owls—he will have to defeat his grandfather, at which point Cobb will be frozen and only awakened from the slumber when the Court so decrees. Cobb will be like this—like it.

The thought makes his heart jump. He doesn’t want to be alone or apart from the only family he has left. He certainly doesn’t want to see any more of his family’s own blood spilled. He would kill anybody else. Anyone. As long as it wasn’t any more of his family. 

A lurid vision of Cobb’s face under this Talon’s, eyes glazed and black veins split open, spilling onto Richard’s fingers, strikes him. His fingers scrabble along the Talon’s cheek as he tears the mask up.

It’s only Alton under the mask. Richard pats the fabric back down, relief washing over him like ice water, and he rushes back to Cobb, who is appraising the Talon’s prone form, the mirror-sheen of the blood. 

“High accuracy, low precision,” muses his grandfather when Richard ducks under his arm, cheek against the man’s ribs. He drapes an arm over Richard’s shoulder—a warm weight that he turns toward. “You’ll do it again and you shall do it better, but in all,” he slips his palm down to Richard’s arm, fondness even in his touch, “excellent work, my heart.”

**_iv._ **

Richard sits cross-legged in the center of the austere marble room, his bare, bowed head a stark contrast to the white, smooth-masked council. Even Cobb, perched far above in the tritorium, wears his black shroud over his face, amber goggles glinting occasionally in the dark. 

“You,” says the Grandmaster—newly chosen after the deposement of her predecessor, with transparent socks and glittering gems and a booming, savage voice—“have been initiated, Talon.”

The empty vial in her palm clinks against her thin, ruby-set rings; even now the sound of it buzzes in Richard’s ear, louder than it should be, louder than it really was. He swallows, the empty, bitter taste of liquid electrum subsumed into his mouth—the drinking of it being perfunctory, almost ceremonial in nature and only occurring after the actual injection had already happened.

The pit of her eyes is as deep as her voice when he tilts his head up at her. 

It’s an insolent move. He was beaten for it often enough in his early years—stabbed, too—but both punishments were fair when the Court leveled them, usually fulfilled by Cobb’s own hands. ‘A blow for every year,’ Cobb said, and had translated Richard’s then twelve years into a knife between every rib. 

If the Court orders Richard to kill Cobb, then it will be fulfilled. The Court is fair. Richard would prefer to be as gentle as Cobb was when he was small, but nineteen-oh-one, his birthyear, might cost more knives than even the Court owned, and it would certainly cost more blows than he could stand to give to the last blood that he has. 

One blow is already too much to stand. 

He expects a backhand, perhaps, for the upward glance. He deserves one.

None comes. Instead, the initiation concludes; the Owls drain out; the Court is kind today. 

Even Heraclitus couldn’t have described the Grandmaster title—it changes constantly, fluxing as the tides of affluence turn in the Court; the Court deposes almost one Grandmaster a year. The face behind the mask changes, but the role does not, nor do the rules; the past reigns. Initiations center around the ending of another face behind a mask for the sake of the maintenance of tradition. 

“How progressive of her.” Cobb’s tone is dry, his throat unslit. He says nothing else. 

He does not speak even when they stalk back. Their steps are noiseless. Silence fills the dim marble hallways that spill into their quarters, broken by the sudden, austere screech of one of Richard’s carved metal boots when he draws to a stop. Cobb stops too.

“I wouldn’t kill you,” Richard tells Cobb finally, the words falling out of his mouth. “I couldn’t. I won’t. You’re my—we’re family. I couldn’t.”

Cobb stares at him for a long, quiet moment more. “You look like your grandmother,” he says, softly. His words are quiet, his eyes pale as lightning. His voice drops. “But I wouldn’t hesitate.”

**_v._ **

“Bruce Wayne,” calls Cobb, haunting and dark and final, “the Court of Owls has come for you.”

The man—tall and immense with eyes the color of water—is mid-sabrage, the long green neck of a glass bottle in one palm, a saber in the other, which both serve as sufficient weapons to smash over Cobb’s shrouded skull. Lincoln March scrabbles against the long marble floor of the hall, out of the bloodshed to come. 

Richard nods curtly at him, curling his fingertips around the cold silver of his own blade. March nods back, sharp eyes flitting to Cobb—the shattering green glass—the scraping rings of metal against metal—the thunder-crash of the breaking window. 

Wayne is falling.

There is instinct, and nothing else. Talon plunges after him on the long, coursing fall down and drives its blade cleanly through his heart. Wayne’s eyes are open—dark—his mouth agape and rattling with the rush of gravity. 

Talon says, “Bruce Wayne, the Court of Owls has sentenced you to die.”

**_vi._ **

It’s clear now that the Court mostly authorized the coexistence of two Talons to fight the growing bane of superheroes in their city. Even with the death of Bruce Wayne, the majority financier of Batman Incorporated—a fulfillment that the Court received with giddiness, such success, such extravagance; finally the dark, rich bane perished—there are swarms of them. Strewn across the Parliament’s enclaves, greatest in Gotham but now elsewhere, too: Antibes, Bludhaven, Poznan. The new Grandmaster must have noticed.

Richard won’t complain—can’t. Not when it means that the Court allows such mercies as this—as his own blood, his own great-grandfather, the man who loved and cared for and raised him since he was small. The Court is flush with kindness. 

“What a delicate thing,” muses Cobb, blade lifting off of the whetstone to relieve the air of the awful scraping sound. He holds the sword flat in his palms, gaze cast down on it like it’s a baby. “So easy to misshape.”

“What?” 

Cobb lifts the sword up obligingly; it has been used too much, its parts lopsided—too well-sharpened, too well-loved. His expression is thoughtful. “I’ve used this since—”

“Since Turner was called Talon,” Richard finishes automatically, “yes, I know, you’ve only said so a million times.”

Grandfather glances up, the edges of his mouth quirking pleasedly even as he tuts and shakes his head. “Insolent boy.”

“You raised me.”

“I shudder to think.” He resheathes the blade, holding it up for show. “This is one less heirloom from me to you.”

“It doesn’t matter. I have your last name. I have your title. The Court says I’m the best they’ve ever had—their greatest, even better than you. I don’t know what else I could possibly take from you.”

Cobb’s eyes flash. “The mission, perhaps.”

Richard pauses. “I thought we would do it together. Like always.”

“I’ll be there, of course. But you would do well to prove your abilities independently. It’s a simple enough mission—these imposters, pathetic as they are in fighting, unworthy of their name.” Cobb’s lips curl. “But nevermind. If you truly think my presence _and_ participation are necessary to carry out the sentence, I’m flattered, though I won’t be able to rest. I’m terribly old, remember, almost one-hundred-and-twenty.”

“You haven’t aged for a whole century,” he replies absently. But the possibilities are crawling in his head. There is something warm about the showered praise the Court lays out—when he killed Bruce Wayne, there was satisfaction, and pride, and excitement. Cobb tapped his cheek with the backs of his knuckles the way he did when Richard was only a child—contact, a warm, heavy contact like summer wind. All that to follow the only thing there is in any moment: instinct. A small price. There have been other kills. There have always been other kills, but those victories were split—Richard usually the slender shadow of his grandfather; the victory over Wayne was nearly his alone. 

Instinct. He can do that. 

And he does—he lets instinct carry him with the blade to the throats of the men and a dagger through the diaphragm of the woman, to the words that rush out of his mouth: “Nightwings all, the Court of Owls has sentenced you to die.” 

There is instinct, diamond-sharp, hot, and nothing else. It feels important and new and unfamiliar being in the black gauntlets and gold lenses all at once again, as if he is thirteen on his very first mission again, not yet comfortable with the weight in his hands—being alone. 

There is nothing else. There is nothing else. There is nothing else. 

There is instinct.

He hesitates.

**_vii._ **

A single failure is not a condemnation. There is another chance to prove himself. A greater one. An immediate one—hours after the failure. New electrum spills down his throat as he swallows it, shivering, in front of the Grandmaster. 

“Redeem yourself,” says the Grandmaster, each word like the strike of a pendulum. “Redeem yourself, Gray Son—tonight.”

**_viii._ **

“Shush,” says Talon, when the girl opens her mouth to speak.

“Who are you?” she whispers, arms coming over the top of her bed’s wooden railing, pajama sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Louder, she says, “‘M I dreaming?”

“ _Shush_.” 

Talon wraps a sharp, dark hand around her mouth, muffling her before she finishes the third word; the mayor is not to see the scene—the consequences of his actions, the fruit of defying the Court—until daybreak. The moon is a sliver in the sky’s rich black center now, hours yet to come. 

She stares up at him placidly—at the white glint off of his blades; the soft, bright turn of his goggles; the way the blackness of the suit strips the streetlights of their worth—transfixed. Her eyes are shiny, are brown, are unbothered. 

Talon has mercy to repay. “It will only be four,” he explains softly, crouching, using his freed hand to click one blade out of his sash. 

He skims fingers over her neck, draws the blade closer to her jugular, mimes the motion four times—a blow for every year. “ _One_ ,” he breathes, but his hand doesn’t move any lower, frozen.

Instead, she moves, pudgy hands leaning up to grab his wrists as best they can. Then they crawl up his arms to his face, until their positions mimic each other—one hand over the mouth, the other on the neck. The width of her hands doesn’t span the entirety of his throat; and he realizes how small she is, only made to seem larger because of her big dark eyes and loud words and an imperious tilt to her spine like even at four she knows the importance of being the mayor’s daughter and there is something so wrenchingly familiar about that—that—

He swallows, draws his hand from her mouth to drape it over her eyes. “Don’t look.” His voice shakes.

The thought is there: not you, not _you,_ not you, anybody, anybody else. 

“Amelia James, the Court of Owls has sentenced you to,” and the word hangs there, strangles there. He can’t. His hands drop. But her fingers draw up to his eyes, slithering under the lenses of his goggles, sending them clattering to the cold, wood ground.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> flash sale on memories stolen from you by an underground bourgeois cult up to 80% off

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello and welcome back !! if u r still following this skqdwh thank u for ur patience ily ! i posted this before i was ready to because i thought ric was gonna be over in nw 69 and i wanted to get this up before then but but it was NOT the end lmfao and now its a whole new ric arc so this is canon divergence au now ig

_**ix.** _

There is instinct, and everything else. 

There is.

**_x._ **

_ —someone here for you. _

Bent knees in wet snow, and a thick black coat, and heavy eyes, and that tall, pale man—the gold-trimmed ticket sticking out of his pocket—who clumsily, forcefully wrapped the coat around him and  _ Here. I. I know you don’t know me, but— _

_**xi.** _

And there were even the parties, with the fancy knives and melon balls and piranhas in gold chiffon. Muscles pulling and fake smiles and the chafe of cufflinks. Hiding a splinted finger under a white glove. Charity case. Teasing someone else—someone tall, dark— _ him _ —who?—about what it must be like to kiss juvederm on all those girls and getting his hair ruffled with a big hand. Different. The same. All the time. 

**_xii._ ** __

You take the trauma, you melt it down until it’s different, you’re different, you do it again, again.  _ Again.  _

“I was close.”

_ I said again. _

**_xiii._ **

_ Watch. Just, just watch for a second,  _ said the boy, a show-off, his first friend here at all, ever, and his hair was wavy like easter grass and it was red and sweaty and sticking to his forehead as he threw the glass at the tree and shattered it into a trillion shining pieces, while they were on the balcony, ribcages jutting against its sculpting, a warm summer night in crisp tuxes and teenage haze and tan skin. The chandelier-lit gala inside was rich, and political, and upsetting; they’d narrowly escaped the clutches of the rich with their almost-fathers still inside.  _ See, look where it hit. That one leaf, Dick, _ and “You’re delusional, Roy Harper,” and wondering when it would be safe to go back inside, if it ever would. 

**_xiv._ **

There was fire, there was no marble or gems like he thought. Her hair was like fire, her orange burning fingertips hot across his skin his throat his cheeks his mouth, the glint of white teeth and gold rope, his best friends, the bad terms, the fun of it all, the fist at his jaw; the the buildings exploded, and the burnt nylon stripes of the circus tent blazed into ash, and here was no porcelain-white, there never, ever was. 

**_xv._ **

_ It isn’t fair, _ and “Maybe it’s not, maybe it’s not fair, Damian, but it’s—its—go clean up and let me talk to Tim, okay?” and  _ You understand, right? _ and being sick of having to understand and having to grieve, endlessly, different lives, the same way, and:

**_xvi._ **

They’re off. It’s off. The goggles are off, metal ridges clattering on the floor and scratching the veneer off the wood, the veneer from his burning eyes. Vision clears. Head pounds. Throb at his temples. He feels sick. Sick.

The mayor’s daughter curls her little white hands around his cheeks, pudgy at the wrists. “Y’okay?”

There is something underneath his skin. 

“...I’m okay,” Dick answers in a soft whisper, gingerly prying her fingers from his cheeks so he doesn’t scratch her when his hands start to shake violently, “I’m — g-go back to sleep, baby.”

He lays her back down and stands in the center of her room, frozen, for a minute before he leaves and runs as far as he can before the cold sickness scratching under his skin overtakes him and sends him falling off the wet ledge of a building and onto the hard, dirty ground. He runs as fast as he can, until his body gives.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry alphonse sapienza exists :/

**_xvii_ ** **_._ **

“Nightwings all,” the thing had said, a vicious, gold-eyed shadow that moved almost like— _ like _ — “The Court of Owls has sentenced you to die.”

**_xviii._ **

Alphonse Sapienza has gone through twelve rounds by the time his Sig Sauer starts feeling like it’ll melt his hand off. That is, coincidentally, also the time that Malcolm stops heaving up blood long enough to say, “God. Sap. Sap, sh-shooting the sky isn’t helping. Guy’s—gone.”

His gun clatters to the ground. 

The guy  _ is  _ gone. Trick of the light. Ghost. Something. 

All that’s left of him are the pearl necklace of bruises around his throat. Knives pricking out of his friends’ skin like rose thorns. Dirty gravel strewn from where the shadow-thing perched on the roof.

Sap drags his hands over his face. His hands are hot from the gun and it feels like his mask’s going to melt into his skin. Then he pries his hands off.

_ Assess,  _ he tells himself.  _ Assess the situation.  _

Colleen is holding herself up on one palm, the other pressed to her thigh, which is almost black with blood. Sap rushes over to her, blood as hot as the smoke from his gun—thrumming in a way that makes his veins feel too small, rushing in his ears. He has half a mind to tear the whole huge seventies collar off of her suit to use it as wrapping, decides against it when he remembers that these suits survived gasfire and gunfire to boot—from guns that held far more rounds than his Sig’s modest fourteen.

“Colleen,” he rumbles. “I—Colleen, this isn’t—”

“Shut up.”

“Is she—” Malcolm says.

“I’m—” Colleen swallows. “You got. You got a couple knives in you too, Mal.”

There’s a tiny clink behind him. Then a wet sound. “…You keeping score, Edwards?”

“Always,” she says. A beat. “Three.” 

Colleen’s one of those pale white girls that looks red, all splotchy skin, pink fingertips, all sunburned in 70 degrees. Always looked like there was too much blood under her skin. Now all the blood’s out. Out. 

Bile in his throat. Alphonse swallows. “We need to call somebody. The. The cops. The cops.”

“We  _ are _ the cops.” 

Colleen sucks in a rasp of a breath, chokes on it. 

“911,” says Alphonse, fumbling, raking his hot fingers over the suit. It’s slick. Blood. Sweat. His phone. Where is his phone? He nearly jams his fingers reaching into the cheap soft-leather plumber’s belt he bought, snapping his burner cell out of a pocket. 

His fingers are wet, slide like water over the digits—trailing red-brown—as he dials, hot breath fogging up the screen. He slaps the brick of a Nokia to his damp cheek, listens for the buzz-pull of the operator.

“Sap,” Colleen’s speaking like she’s got lungs full of radio static, “Alphonse Sapienza, Sap, Sap, don’t you  _ dare, _ no hospitals, I’m Nightwing, I’m  _ Nightwing,  _ Sap, I’m dressed like—” 

_ “911. Fire and police. This call is being recorded. What is your emergency?” _

Alphonse is panting. Ragged. 

_ “What is your emergency?” _

“I—” he rasps. 

Malcolm says, “Sap.”

Sap says, “Wrong number. Sorry.” Snaps the phone shut.

Malcolm stares at him for a long moment, chest rising, falling, temples shining, blood dark. Nose busted. “You—”

_ Know the rules, know the protocol,  _ thinks Alphonse rapidly. Been doing this twenty years, been on the police force since he was wet behind the ears, all starry-eyed.  _ Know what they’re gonna do next.  _

Malcolm spits again. Red. The color disappears on the asphalt. “They’re going to track the call. Send someone. To check.”

“Stupid,” breathes Colleen, angry. “Stupid  _ idiot _ .”

“I know!” snaps Alphonse. Quieter, “I know.”

Colleen’s fingers are coating the blue v-wing of her costume with red. The blood’s even darker than the red on Malcolm’s costume. 

Alphonse rakes his finger through his hair. Hates the way it feels under the faux-grip of the gloves. Imperfect. Artificial. (Practical. Devastatingly.)

He’s shaking. Down to his wrists. Down to his fingers. His knees want to buckle so bad it hurts. 

“You guys go,” he tells them, hoarse, and they obey, because he’s the leader and because they’re ripped to shreds by this Court of Owls and need medical attention, and if the only way they’ll accept it is after peeling off their costumes, then so be it. So be it.

Malcolm stands to pull Colleen up. Alphonse looks down at the place Malcolm had been—the asphalt gleaming; the slick vermillion color painting the owl-blade; a white tooth, Malcolm’s tooth, the source of the clinking sound, earlier—and tries not to throw up. “What are you going to do?”

Alphonse says, “I’m going to catch owl-boy.”

Colleen pauses, arm around Malcolm’s neck. 

She says, “Sap. Make him pay.”

**_xix._ **

It takes him all night to loop through the Coral District. No use going to the docks. No rich secret society’s going near Meadowvale Mall. Not if it’s worth the trouble of assassins, however ineffective they may be. No. This party’s all gold knives, all skill. It has money. Which knocks out almost all of Bludhaven, and takes him right back to square one. 

By the time he makes it to the rich crust of St. Bernard’s, the sky’s losing its dark tinge, the sun rising. Its light pools under the yellow streetlamps. 

Alphonse can feel himself running out of steam. The gaps between the rooftops are getting wider. His feet heavier. He makes it two more blocks before he hears dry heaving. He thinks it’s himself, for a second. 

It’s not. He stops, braces his knees with his hands, listens.

Drunk girl. Probably. Haven’s choking with them. No one’s looking after them. Not his problem when he’s on the clock, when he’s carrying the badge. People have to deal. People have to learn how to. 

It feels different at night. It’s the costume, maybe. He’s still getting used to it.

He peers over the ledge, which is walled with old aluminum cans, plastic bags, decades-old pea gravel. Alleyway’s made of smudges, streetlights mostly useless here anyway. 

The new sunlight exposes slots of bare skin under ripped black fabric. It uncovers a curled figure that looks more like a lump of coal than anything else. A person.

The person shifts. Keeps gagging. Policy at the precinct is, No one’s dying if the sound’s still going. You don’t do anything. You don’t gotta. Sap stays there anyway, takes a minute to press his forehead between his knees and breathe. His throat’s thick. 

Then the sound stops. 

Alphonse yanks his head up fast, clunkers down the decrepit fire escape, tries to tamp down the sudden spikes in his chest. 

“Miss?...Sir?” he corrects as he approaches, groping for his maglight and shining it at the person. His pulse is thudding in his throat.

The beam strikes wild eyes and a familiar face.

“Gr—” Alphonse steps back, squinting.  _ “Grayson?” _

There’s a long, stretching beat before—

“Guilty,” comes the kid, faint. The light turns him salt-colored. Sharp nails splay over the dirty brick wall. Scraping. His head tilts back, face silvery, damp. His eyelashes cling to his wet skin. His eyes flicker. “...Guilty as charged.”

The relief feels like ice water over his muscles, heartbeat skidding. Sap shuts his eyes again and they’re silent, together, until there’s another retch. Sap slowly cracks an eye open, letting out a long breath.

“You sound like you’re about to be sick.”

The kid chuckles—one-note, thick. “Huh.”

Maybe drunk girl wasn’t too far off, Sap thinks. The thought makes him tense all over again, the anger back from before. 

“What happened to you?” demands Alphonse, stepping forward to help him up, outstretching a tense hand. “Are you drunk or something? We  _ needed  _ you back there. We—that thing—the Court of Owls.” Ric doesn’t extend his hand so Sap bends to grabs his wrist, which is wreathed in heavy silver. He drops the hand. Freezes. “It. They. They got to you too, didn’t they?” 

Ric won’t stop staring at the space his hand had been, blankly, but at that he looks up glassily and cocks his head. Alphonse’s stomach sinks like a stone in a lake. 

“Didn’t they.”

Ric licks his lips, swallows visibly. 

Then Alphonse takes another slow, long look at him. The pieces click into place. The black get-up. The crazy eyes. Sure enough, there’s those stupid little owl blades strapped to his chest too. 

“You’re.”

Alphonse stumbles back, hands dropping to his sides. Hot sweat pours down his neck. His fingers grope for his Sig, inching it out of its holster again. 

“You’re one of them. Aren’t you.  _ Aren’t  _ you.”

He points the gun. Cocks it with trembling fingers. 

Ric’s looking up at him blankly. His mouth’s open, wet, dark lips cracked, and his damp hair is swirling over his forehead. His eyes narrow before he says, “Don’t.”

“What?” Alphonse says. He points the gun between the kid’s eyes, ignoring how his hand shakes. How his voice shakes too. “What are you? Why are you doing this? You  _ worked  _ with us. You worked with—with Batman. You were a—you were Nightwing. You said that you were Nightwing.” His throat goes dry. “Unless you were never him. You were lying to us the whole time. Richard Gr—Ric Grayson never existed, did he? Did he? You were never Nightwing, were you, the real Nightwing must be dead, and you just—lied.”

What a miserable game. This man—this thing that he’d called his  _ friend— _ this owl minion—played them all. Made Bea fall in love with him, made Sap believe that he was Nightwing once, had gotten his brains all blown out and lost his memories. Made them all believe him. Give them all their secrets. Just to get close enough to kill them. 

“Why?” he barks. He shakes the gun.  _ “Why?” _

The thing doesn’t say anything at all. 

“Why? Huh? Why do you, why does your Court of Owls want us dead so bad?”

“Look,” says the thing. 

Alphonse shoots. 

**_xx_ ** **.**

The thing moves inhumanly fast. 

It scrabbles up before the bullet leaves the chamber, slams an arm against Sap’s windpipe before the gunshot  _ pops.  _ An elbow in the bevel of his throat. Hot breath on his cheek. 

The bullet plows through the gray brick of the wall, burying itself there, and it takes the faraway  _ bang  _ of the gun and its vibrations through his palm before Alphonse realizes the position he’s in, pressed against the cold wall with the thing at his throat, teeth an inch from his. The beat is like cement.

“Listen,” says the thing at last, breathing heavily. “They did.”

The pressure lifts off of his throat. He tries to muster up the saliva to spit, but his mouth’s gone dry. “They did  _ what?” _ he croaks.

Its nose is a millimeter from his, its eyes dark and intent and desperate, and it looks  _ so  _ much like Ric. “They got to me too.”

**_xxi._ **

They’re sitting criss-cross-applesauce in the alleyway, like kindergartners waiting for storytime, like one of them isn’t armed to the teeth, like the other isn’t a vigilante with a hand on his gun. 

“I wasn’t lying to you,” Grayson is saying. He’s all different. Somehow. Soft-voiced. Soft-edged. Eyes are flickering all over the place. Fingers drumming against his knee. “I wasn’t. I—existed.”

“And I’m supposed to just believe that.” 

“I exist,” he insists, off-beat, and it dawns on Sap that they’re having different conversations. There’s a pause where the kid must realize that too and he adds, “I don’t think you’d be sitting here if you didn’t believe me.”

Sap scoffs derisively. “Maybe you don’t understand how confessions work, kid.”

Ric’s eyes slit dangerously. Another measured pause. “I guess asking you to trust me is out the window then too.” 

“Trusting you’s what got us into this mess in the first place.”

“I  _ wasn’t  _ lying.” His voice is so loud it startles Alphonse, even though he’s right across from him. “I wasn’t. I—God.” He rakes his fingers through his hair. The silver talons draw thin, dark streaks at his hairline. Sap’s stomach churns because, for whatever reason, trusting him  _ isn’t _ out the window. “It’s like I’ve got three different people in my head.”

There’s a sudden rustling noise from above, and Ric lurches up, eyes huge and alert, and Sap catches a silver glint in his right hand and something gold clutched in his left before he whips around to see the ledges himself. 

A white plastic bag with red text floats down in the wind:

> THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU _.  _

Ric snatches it out of the air and balls it in his fist, switching the silver blade to his left hand, standing like a ramrod. He looks at Alphonse. “We need to go.”

“It was a bag,” says Alphonse, settling back down, heartrate returning to almost normal. “What, you think it, you think  _ that  _ was the Court?”

Grayson’s eyes look like glass. “We need to go.”

**_xxii._ **

Alphonse watches silently in the rearview mirror of his car—finest Honda Civic money can buy, which he ditched in the parking garage off 3rd—to see Ric tearing off his black gloves with his teeth, the talons off the gloves scrabbling and carving deep grooves into his cheeks. He waits, having already changed himself. Then.

“Aren’t you—aren’t you hurting yourself?” 

A sideways glance. “Don’t worry about it.” 

The motion of sliding on the sweatshirt from Sap’s gym bag obscures the rear window for an instant with blue cotton, one of Sap’s loose cigarettes falling to the floor. 

Alphonse sinks back into his seat silently, knocking his fingers against the steering wheel—and he does, for what it’s worth, worry. 

**_xxiii._ **

“Here?”

“Here.” Alphonse rests his hand on the back of the passenger seat to look back, keeping his other hand on his holster, mindful of the fact that this man had him against a wall before he could blink and has a head full of lies and half-truths but also...that this is his friend. “Is here a problem?”

Ric’s staring out the window, the dying blue signage twisting and reflecting off his dark eyes. His pupils are pinpricks. He doesn’t flinch. Screws his eyes all up. Pulls Alphonse’s BPD ballcap lower on his face and rubs the bill of it between his fingers.

“...No. If it’s safe.”

“Good. It is.” Alphonse isn’t well-acquainted with memory loss or acquisition, the only exception being the man in his backseat who he formerly called one of his best friends. (Malcolm called the Nightwings coworkers at best. It wasn’t like that, for Sap.) He unbuckles his seatbelt, waits a moment before he speaks. “There shouldn’t be. You love this place.” 

“I...came here a lot?”

Sap unbuckles his seatbelt. “Never shut up about it. Kamlo’s the only Romanian place in town. Good sponge cake.”

“Hungarian,” Ric corrects suddenly, then blinks. “It’s Hungarian, and Romani. Not Romanian.”

“No an,” Sap agrees placidly, hands up on the wheel in careful concession, “Got it.” A silence settles between them. Kid won’t meet his gaze in the rearview. Sap turns around, flicks the kid’s knee. Says, “You don’t...you don’t remember this either?”

“It’s not—that.” Ric’s voice is fast. “I remember. I know everything I did with Bea, you, with—the others. Mal and Colleen and. You know? I remember that. It just doesn’t feel.” A beat. Sharp inhale. Continue. “Did you know I never. I  _ never  _ came here before.”

Alphonse raises his hands helplessly. “Of course you have. I’ve been here with you.”

“No. I mean  _ before _ .” He meets Sap’s eyes, suddenly, devastatingly; teeth on his cracked lips and eyes intense. His words come out in a rush like he doesn’t mean to say them out loud at all, like he hasn’t processed that they’re even things he knows until they’ve already come out. “I always felt like too much of a faker to go in. Do you, do you know that I don’t even speak it anymore? Mess up on rhotics. The pronunciations. Get all mixed up in my head. With all the others. Can ask for water, but anything else, I barely remember.” His jaw shuts with a sudden click, and it’s over. The silence is thick.

Sap stares at him. He isn’t a good person to spill your guts to, his mother always said, cause he just shut it off, cause he never had the patience. But Grayson didn’t have any guts to spill to him for the longest time. Sap wants to ask _what’s wrong with you_ or _what’d they do to you_ _why are you so different_ or _how’d they get you in that costume if you aren’t one of them._

Instead he yanks the keys out of the transmission and weighs them in his hand. “Then you can order the sponge cake like the rest of us. You can pronounce that at least. I hope.”


	4. Chapter 4

**_xxvi._ **

“I need to ask you a question.”

Sap hasn’t stopped turning the menu in his hands since they got here. They aren’t serving sponge cake at breakfast. He straightens. “Shoot.”

Dick shifts. “Is—” the jingle of the opening door interrupts him. He whips around. 

A white man with a scraggly beard comes in with a washed-out five dollar bill in his hand. He sits on a barstool. Dick doesn’t recognize him as an Owl. Dick doesn’t recognize him at all.

Owls aren’t usually that subtle. But he’s hesitant to trust his mind when all his memories fall together like a photograph of a photograph of a photograph. Faint. Obscured. He remembers twice and some are clear—Bruce was the dark man at the circus, Bruce drilled him in training, Bruce, Bruce, Bruce and yet. There are low simmering waves of anxiety that slap against the insides of his head that hiss  _ what if? _

Dick inhales shakily and turns back to Sap, who’s watching with a concerned look on his face, lips clamped shut. His head hasn’t stopped pounding. His insides churn. Like a living fever. The thing still lurks under his skin. 

Killing him. Killing him. The champagne in his hand the blade through his chest the look in his eyes. Him.

“Is Bruce Wayne still alive?” Dick asks at last, hushed, urgent, awful. 

Sap says,  _ “...Oh.”  _

Dick’s stomach plunges. 

But then Sap relaxes, sets the menu down, scratching the back of his neck. “Oh. I thought you were going to ask something else, I—yes. Last I heard he was unveiling some memorial.”

The relief undoes everything. 

Dick slumps forward, burying the heels of his palms into his eyes. He gasps out a long-overdue breath. “God.”

“Kid?”

“Give me a minute,” Dick manages. Sap does. “...Thank you.”

“I mean, it’s nothing, kid,” Sap says, uncomprehending. “It’s the truth.”

The words make his eyes burn, and he scrubs away the tears it brings with a scrape of his hand, letting out a short, wet laugh. He drops his hands away from his face. Sap’s staring at him strangely, but he doesn’t say anything, which Dick appreciates. There is the thought (there is always the thought), the morbid terrible awful instinctive unthinking one, that Sap would be an easy corpse to identify: ugly stitches in his chin, left cheek birthmark, cigarette burn on the center of his left palm. The repulsiveness of it almost makes him bite the tip of his tongue off. It’s just awful, even about someone who just tried to shoot him an hour ago, and it’s worse because Dick knows that Sap is supposedly his friend, that Sap knows Dick almost killed him this morning and is still not prying for the ugly details he deserves immediately. 

He can’t even focus on that. Everything’s veining in all at once — memories sights sounds sensations fondness euphoria freedom anger shame  _ resentment  _ — and it isn’t stopping so he has to pick one thing to chew on at a time. For example.

The waitress calls Dick “baby.” Lets him know he doesn’t need to order because she’d called it in when she saw him come in. Tells him she likes his hair pushed over to that side, rubs his shoulder while listening to Sap try to pronounce his crepe order. She’s an older woman with shiny hair and pockmarks and Dick wants to think he’s never seen her before in his life except he  _ has  _ and she looks too much like his mother if she’d ever gotten old. He knows her inside jokes and understands the familiarity of her. He knows her. 

He shouldn’t.

Sap turns the menu until she takes it as she leaves. They sit in silence, Dick with his hard hands over his eyes and Sap nursing his dark coffee until the waitress brings their food and departs once more. 

“Can  _ I _ —”

“Ask,” Dick says. 

He is sorry, in an abstract way, for the way that he is being, but he actually cannot bring himself to care. He can’t find a filter between his tongue and thoughts anymore. The Vietnam War is happening in his brain right now, an endless, agonizing tug of war between pain and uncertainty and raw, bleeding anger that he cannot find the source of.  _ Bruce is alive, _ he tells himself occasionally, and every time the words bring a cold rush of relief that quiets the pounding for a few instants before it starts back up again, and every time it comes back worse. 

He hears Sap’s fork scrape against a plate, hears the hesitation. “I mean. What happened?”

**_xxvii._ **

“So your grandfather...is crazy. And he, and the secret society that owns him, they’re obsessed with you, and they suppressed your real memories by manipulating your recovery therapy after the,” Sap feigns a gunshot by touching his fingertips to his temples, “because they wanted to—”

Dick cuts into his palacsinta spiritlessly and takes a sharp bite.  _ “Great _ grandfather.”

Sap shakes his head and continues. “Because they wanted you to be an assassin like him. A Talon. And they brainwashed  _ you _ into thinking you were an assassin last night with some fu—with some mind-bending glasses into your brain.”

“Goggles.”

“Okay. Then they used the  _ goggles  _ to make you think you were an assassin by reactivating your old memories to change them into new memories about being a — whatever they are — which was why you attacked us. But that didn’t work because the transfer was interrupted when the goggles got taken off. So you just got your old ones back.”

“Correct,” Dick says. “It’s my theory, anyway.”

“Okay. Okay. I think I got it this time.” Sap nods. His mood’s improved considerably since he got a call from the hospital. From Malcolm, which is a name Dick can pin with a face and a friendship and a feeling but makes him shift. He said they got lucky. Malcolm’s down a molar, Colleen’s down 15% of her blood volume and some lung capacity. But they’re not dead. Not even close. Sap nearly threw up when he got the call. Dick could see the tension seep away from him, but Dick’s tension does not escape him — unbidden, he thinks,  _ instinct, failure, orders, _ and then shakes his head, tight. “God. And it was only a couple hours.”

“Hours,” Dick agrees. “But they’ve been — they must have been planning this for months. Since I woke up in the hospital. Since...before.”

The thought makes his head pound even worse. He slaps his palms over his temples, fingers raking through his hair. 

The line between the fake memories and the real hours and the  _ now  _ is almost nonexistent. The only thing he can reference it against is if he has another memory on that same day, of that same thing, that works out different. It was Bruce that raised him, he has to keep reminding himself, not Cobb, never Cobb. But did he swallow electrum? Maybe. Did he kill anyone? Maybe; he tried, certainly — Colleen and Sap and Malcolm — but that clearly didn’t work, but the attempt counts, but it didn’t happen and he didn’t kill them, but  _ he had a knife to a baby’s throat. _

There could have been more. Maybe there was more. Everything’s a maybe except that he can’t trust his head. Can he? After his grandfather fished around in it, after a bullet shattered it, after the chemicals in his brain got screwed up from months coldturkey off his Lexapro? How can he ever trust himself around anyone again?

“Sap,” he says, because it is what he has to do, but it comes out wooden. “For whatever it’s worth, for what happened to you, to Colleen, to — everyone, I am. I am so, so —”

“Shut up,” says Sap. “I mean. I don’t take excuses. But as far as. I mean, brainwashing goes pretty damn far. It is what it is.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Dick tells him, like a child, before he can stop himself. 

“I know,” says Sap. “That’s what I’m saying. It’s not you who’s got to pay.”

**_xxviii._ **

Sap doesn’t make it much longer in the diner before he tells Dick he’s going outside for a smoke break. Between the exhaustion and the near-death experience and whatever this is, Dick can’t blame him. He saw the Marlboro Lights in the man’s gym bag, smelled the inside of his car. 

Yet there is a part of Dick that is angry at that, deeply, irrationally, incurably, constantly angry, that wants to say _ you do not get to do that, you do not get to be Nightwing and do that, there’s a responsibility, it’s your responsibility, don’t you get that? you don’t smoke, you have to be better, you have to, you have to.  _

But Alphonse Sapienza was not Robin, never had to be, and he did not see how Gordon used to pound through half a paper box in an hour, turning away from Dick all the while so the smoke wouldn’t go down his throat, how he used to say, “Don’t start, kid, you won’t ever stop,” in a nice gesture that didn’t ever stop the backflowing wind. Alphonse Sapienza did not ever have to be perfect.

Dick grabs the plastic side of the booth for the urge of having something to crush. 

There is a part of him that wants to grab him by the collar and say  _ you do not get to be Nightwing you are not Nightwing you never were _ **_I am._ **

That part of him is almost all of him, jealous, fitful, enraged. But he cannot trust himself like this anymore. He likes Sap, even; he does not know where exactly the rage is coming from. 

Well. He does. But not now. 

He bites his tongue again. And it bleeds. This is not for now. He takes a gift card and two old, laundry-soft twenty dollar bills out of the wallet Sap left behind, and slips the bills on the table to pay, making a mental note to pay the man back. He just can’t be in here anymore. He needs to be outdoors, in the sunlight. He leaves, starts turning over the skeleton of a plan in his mind. 

“Sap?” he says when he sees him. The morning breeze hits like a slap to the face. The sun is bright, the day new. The splintering anger subsides a little.

Sap raises an eyebrow at him, smoke catching in the wind and drifting toward Dick. Dick tosses his wallet at him, and the man has to drop the cigarette on the ground to catch it, grinding it out with his boot after a moment, singing the yellow grass underfoot. “You good?”

“We should go,” Dick says. Pause. “It’s time to go.”

“Where?”

Dick takes off his ballcap to look at the sun without a barrier. Squints. 

It hurts.

“My apartment.”

Sap makes a disbelieving noise, and when Dick looks back at him, his jaw’s dropped. 

“You have an apartment?!”

He gets a flash, then, of hitchhiking from Gotham, of living in a cab and showering at a gym, of sneaking in and out of houses. Of even earlier at his old flat in Bludhaven, with Shawn and her canvases and the flowery wallpaper that kept peeling off in the living room. 

Then it occurs to Dick that he might not  _ have  _ an apartment anymore — it’s been months. His lease must be up; he makes sure his leases are short so he doesn’t stay too long in any one place, doesn’t put his neighbors in danger. Besides, since he got shot, who would have been paying the rent? Bruce? 

The thought makes him go still. His fingers curl. _ Alive,  _ he tells himself, but it’s not enough anymore, suddenly. He can’t remember Bruce ever even visiting him after he came to Bludhaven. The last time he saw the man after he woke up at the hospital room and took him to the Manor was when he showed Dick his brains getting blown out from fifty different angles and asked him to go back to being normal like it didn’t even — like it — 

Anger pulses through him again. He swallows the sour taste in his mouth past the lump in his throat. 

It’s a double-edged sword: he wants his apartment to be the way it was, wants to go back to the way things were when they were good and easy. He would like it if Bruce cared enough to keep it. He would like to go home. But he will hate Bruce beyond measure if the man paid for an apartment he knew Dick would not —  _ could not  _ — use simply because he needed the memory of him to cling to without bothering to take care of the person. 

Dick shoves the anger down in his chest: not now.

Instead, he looks at Sap, arms outstretched, and says honestly, “...Maybe.”

Sap looks at him, all dark eyes and deep-lined — and then he barks out a rough laugh, not unkind but edging on incredulous, scrubbing his hands over his eyes. “God, Ric Grayson. You’re a mess.” 

Dick feels his mouth twist at the nickname. “Actually. About that.”


	5. Chapter 5

**_xxix._ **

“‘Dick,’” says Alphonse, testing the name out while he drums his fingers anxiously against the steering wheel on the drive to the dockside apartment. He glances at the man beside him, who moved up from the backseat to sit in the front. “Did you ever think about changing that, or.”

Dick seems calmer than before, posture less guarded but still stiff, mouth pursed. Fingers wound tight around the seatbelt. He tilts his head. “Never.”

“Did people ever, like, make —”

“Loads,” says Dick. “All the time.”

Not in the mood for small talk, then. Sap scratches behind his ear and drives in silence for a while, hand itching to turn on the radio but not daring. 

Sap’s only been shot once. Through and through in the side. Attempted robbery at a liquor store back when he was a beat cop. But it screwed him physically for thirteen months. Paranoia kept him up every night. Had him nicking ballistic vests from work to wear to coffee shops, to banks much longer than thirteen months. Getting your head blown up is a whole different ballgame. This quagmire of amnesia and assassins and vigilantism’s a different sport entirely. 

The silence stagnates. Sap’s got to fill it with something. The urge overtakes him. He says, “One time my mom got engaged to this guy whose last name was literally Feo.”

The car makes a sound as it goes over a pothole. Then the quiet is back, stretching. “That sucks.”

“It does.” Sap makes a tight left turn, nodding. “They didn’t end up getting married cause he fell in love with someone else. I hated his guts for that. But, God, you have to feel bad for him. He didn’t pick it. His dad didn’t, his abuelo didn’t. Imagine your last name being Ugly.”

A beat. “My mom called me it.”

“Your mom called you Ugly?”

A short huff of laughter. “No. Um. She called me Dick. The implications aren’t there when you don’t speak English.”

“This street?” says Sap, tilting his head, and Dick nods. Sap turns again. “I mean, would that have stopped her? My mom speaks Spanish so she knew and she was still...she would have married him. A name’s just a name, I guess. It isn’t everything.”

Dick doesn’t answer. Sap doesn’t make him — the silence in the car isn’t companionable, exactly, and Dick is not Ric, a fact his odd mannerisms and constantly moving eyes and changing expressions and name have made clear — but it’s not tense as before. He pulls onto the street with the bent-over lightpost, the marker Dick told him to look out for, and parks by the curb. He looks over. 

Dick puts his cap back on and meets his gaze. It’s inscrutable.

“You ready?” says Sap. 

“No one had better be home,” says Dick, not answering the question as he gets out of the car. 

Sap pauses, exhales. Checks his watch. “Almost 9 AM. They’d be at work.” Another pause. “You didn’t leave any of your...night gear in there where civilians would have found it, right? If the landlords emptied out your place?”

“No,” Dick murmurs, shaking his head. “Nothing they could get into, at least. I’m not stupid. It was — I kept most of it underground off 10th, that abandoned metro bay. You know that.”

Sap does know that, because he was the officer called when Ric Grayson tried to burn Nightwing’s lair all to ashes. That was how he got the suits, distributed them to Mal, to Colleen. 

**_xxx._ **

They’re already on the third floor of the building by the time that Sap realizes they don’t have a key and he is going to be an accessory to a B&E outside of the Nightwing suit if they re-leased the flat; Dick doesn’t seem nearly concerned enough. “We won’t do any breaking,” he tells Sap like it’s supposed to be reassuring, which it is not, coming from a former amnesiac two hours off being a brainwashed assassin for a cult, even one that he’s fallen back into trusting so easily.

“Wh — is that my Pinkberry card?” Sap hisses to Dick when the man starts bending a recognizable white gift card towards the doorknob of his old apartment and pressing it into the gap, walking the edge of it back toward the slanted face of the latch. “You were in my wallet?”

The lock clicks. Dick twists the doorknob, and the door opens a crack, showing an inch of darkened apartment. He looks back at Alphonse and hands him the card with a half-apologetic, half-dry look. “Here.”

Sap takes a deep breath to calm down.  _ Borrowing _ , Sap tells himself,  _ not theft. Think about it like the night job. You swipe evidence all the time.  _

Dick reaches in the open sliver of the door — there’s a chain, a heavy one keeping it from opening fully, Sap realizes — and then raises his eyebrows, groping the interior wall. A beep resounds from inside, and then Dick reaches upward and the chain falls away. He looks back bright-eyed and opens the door. “We’re in.”

The apartment is devoid of people, and when Dick flicks the lights on, he sees that it’s also almost entirely devoid of things, save some sparse furniture, a single poster, and a huge stack of mail addressed to  _ DICK GRAYSON _ on the kitchen counter. Sap walks over to the kitchen to check if the water’s still running while Dick locks the door with an odd spring in his step. This is still his apartment, then. No one else moved in. 

The faucet creaks when Sap turns it. But the water runs. Someone  _ must  _ have been paying for this. For ten whole months.

He glances back at the kid, who’s going through the stack of mail — old stuff, the top of the stack said July and it’s May now — with a somber yet fond expression. Who paid? Sap wonders. His dad, maybe — or whatever Batman was to Nightwing. Hopefully not the Court. 

He looks away again when Dick looks up, probably feeling the weight of his gaze. 

**_xxxi._ **

They end up going through the contents of his fridge, which is one of the only decorated parts of the whole apartment, stuffed with novelty magnets, photos, post-it notes, short letters, even movie tickets. They don’t speak. But there was a life here. A well-loved one. 

One Sap hadn’t even known existed. He knew Ric only remembered his childhood and had only been told about the night-half, the vigilante-half of his adulthood. Seeing the other half is almost too much. It’s odd, seeing it when the Richard Grayson he knew had been nothing but adamant about running away from it. It’s odd, being in his home when the man he knew didn’t have one and lived out of his alcohol-stained yellow cab. 

It makes Sap feel like a stranger.

For that reason, and because Sap doesn’t want to open his mouth and breathe in the toxic fumes from the actual brown swamp that a basket of nectarines melted into in one of the refrigerated drawers, he stays silent while they pile up trash. Their fingers brush occasionally, jackets touching, a quick weight, but Dick is mostly distant. His expression flashes alternately dark and light as he dumps out rotten ten month old blueberries and molded-through pita bread, lips tightening and ticking up before shooting down into a scowl before lighting up again, mind clearly somewhere else. 

The only things that survive the purge are a jar of peanut butter, some protein powder, and one frozen pizza. 

“You can go,” Dick says suddenly, leaning against the counter and staring at the door after wiping down the fridge one last time. “You should go.”

“What?” asks Sap, startled. 

Dick looks at him. “The hospital. Work. Don’t you have something to go to?”

Sap scoffs, lifting an eyebrow. He drops the white garbage bag on the ground and draws closer, suspicious. “I’m off today.” Beat. “What. You want me gone or something?” 

“You should go visit them,” Dick says, crossing his arms, not looking at him. “They’re your friends.”

“They’re your friends too,” says Sap. 

Dick lurches forward, eyes burning as he finally turns to Sap.  _ “I _ nearly —” 

He seethes, chest heaving. Then he stops. Falls back on his heels. Eyes screwing shut. He bunches the fabric where his fingers rest on his sleeves. Sap takes a long step back. Dick opens his eyes again. 

“...I nearly killed them,” he says, low. “I could kill you too. You should go.”

“I’m Nightwing,” Sap says, raising his arms expectantly. A challenge. “I can take care of myself.”

Dick’s jaw clenches again immediately. He looks at Alphonse with dark, brown eyes and says nothing. 

Sap looks back, dead on, then he gives into speaking again, angry.

“Do you really think you would?” asks Sap.

“I don’t know,” Dick says, mouth tight. “I don’t know. That’s the problem.” 

“I know,” Sap retorts.  _ “I _ know. You couldn’t do it when you had those goggles on, when they were still in your head. You could have killed us. You could have killed that girl you told me about. But you didn’t.”

“But I _ could have.” _

“Then why didn’t you?” Sap shoots back. “Huh? What stopped you?”

A silence falls. Dick drops his gaze. Sap waits, but nothing comes. A seabird from the docks crows outside the window. The fridge beeps from being left open. 

He can feel himself get frustrated, and he tells himself to wait, but there is still nothing, and he finally gives it up. 

“Fine,” Sap says, balling his fists. “Fine. I’ll leave.” Sap shoves his keys and his phone into his pocket and prepares to leave. Before he does, he looks back at the person he knew — knows? — and his lips twist down. “Call Bea when you can. She deserves to know.”

He stomps down the stairs — maybe it is for the best that he goes to the hospital to see everyone, he has so much to explain to them — but it’s frustrating. And it’s hard not to be offended at getting pushed to the side as if he didn’t do anything for Dick, he thinks as he reaches into his jacket pocket for his keys. 

There’s something unfamiliar, an old gum wrapper maybe, but when he pulls it out, it’s forty dollars cash. Sap pauses, eyes narrowing. He holds one of the bills up to the light out of sheer habit. The watermark’s there. Real. But Sap never keeps cash anywhere but his wallet because of Bludhaven’s pickpockets. He looks back up at the glint from the third-story window in the apartment building, and squints, and gets back in his car. 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the chapter spam but f i n a l l y dick and damian reunite!

**_xxxii._ **

When Dick is alone in his apartment again, he places his forehead against the cold cement countertop. And stays like that. 

Another hour passes before he can draw himself up. He walks to the medicine cabinet above his stove and shoves aside the surgical thread and celox to find ibuprofen. Downs four. 

Head won’t quit hurting. A clawing ache under his muscles, wrapping around his bones. Out of advil. He’ll have to just deal with the fever-feeling.

Finally, Dick throws his bedroom door open. The glass block window on his left fills the room with the soft midday light, highlighting dust suspended in the air. Bed’s untouched. Hospital corners. Like Alfred taught him. 

“Alfred,” Dick sighs, running a gentle hand over the blue sheets, stomach hurting at the mere thought of his name. 

He misses him. Alfred came to the Prodigal Bar to see him when he didn’t have his memories, held his shoulder, and didn’t say _you have to come back_ or _what’s wrong with you._ Didn’t run out of the Manor yelling at him when he couldn’t bear Bruce’s expectations or being memoryless or the shaky video of crimson brain tissue spraying into dark rain. 

Alfred let him be. Alfred missed Dick not for who he used to be or should have been; Alfred paid his bar tabs and told him he was a right good young man. But that was what the man had always done, even when Dick was twelve and violent and molten with grief. 

Then Dick picks up his phone to ring Alfred. Drops it back on the bed, chest in knots. The phone’s dead anyway—sat unplugged on his nightstand for almost a year. But he also doesn’t want to— _to_ —

His headache’s getting worse. He can’t think. Clenches his jaw, unclenches it. Stabs the charger into his phone with shaking, scraping hands, eyes searing. Goes back to the kitchen and downs another ibuprofen. Even though he shouldn’t.

**_xxxiii._ **

He finds himself sitting cross-legged on the floor going through months old, unopened mail until the sky turns to night. It’s difficult to read with the growing dimness outside the windows and the building pressure in his head, but the assurance that he is Dick Grayson, and that he wasn’t — isn’t — entirely alone in the world, and that there was a life before getting shot before the yelling before the Owls is. Is. 

_Thank yuo Uncle_ ~~_nigh_~~ _N !!!! I lovE the stuffEd animal so much I took him with mE whEn wE did our road trip i namEd him william hE is gratE and cutE!!! I miss yuo so doEs daddy thank yuo i lovE yuo so much!!!_ reads Lian’s big pink handwriting, in a thank-you note for the giant Cheburashka doll Dick got for her last June when he was in Yekaterinburg. 

There’s an embossed invitation to one of Donna’s now long-past photography shows up in New York. Dick recognizes the collection name as the one she was the most excited about and that he said he’d make _no matter what_ after missing the one before it because Bruce needed him in Gotham that night instead.

Wally forwarded him a postcard with a picture of an absolutely obnoxious-looking bird with a huge red throat and a dismayed expression labelled FRIGATEBIRD in Jokerman font, postmarked from somewhere in remote Antigua. On the other side if it, a smeared sharpie note says: _this reminded me of u,_ and the sheer stupidity of it makes Dick smile for the first time since he woke up, and laugh until he cries for the first time in over a year. 

Everytime the laughter stops, it starts again, until he’s bent over, taking wheezing breaths with his forehead pressed into the cheap laminate, hand pressed to his chest. 

That’s when the pressure breaks. Chest light—head clear. He scrubs a hand over his damp face, trying not to break back into hysterics between wet gasps, biting his knuckles when he does. He stands to go put the card on the fridge, stepping over the absolute mess of envelopes and letters and bills. 

He usually keeps his apartment sparse, pristine, because it helps him think, but when he gets his mail, he’s usually too tired to do anything with it other than dump it on his countertop. As he goes to unplug his phone from the bedroom, he idly wonders how much has accumulated in his mailbox downstairs. 

The phone chimes as it boots up. He shifts, trying to think if he should ask Wally what he was doing in Antigua or if he should…

He pauses.

What _is_ he going to say? To any of his friends? _‘Hi, I got my memories back, sorry about ignoring all of you for ten months, we should get together and do something soon?’_

The thought stops him cold. He wasn’t ignoring them, not exactly — he didn’t know they existed at all. But they had to have known what had happened to him. They had to. So why didn’t they come see him? Come shake sense into him, come see through the sham that was Dr. Haas and the Owls? 

At first he feels guilty—they’re his friends, he can’t just assume that, and they all have their own lives now. And as Ric he would have shoved them aside the way he did with Bruce, would have rejected them. But he can’t stop the bitter tinge of betrayal in his mouth as he turns it over in his head. None of them even tried? Not one? 

It’s almost too efficient, too complete. The Titans are a well-oiled machine, but not like this. And they wouldn’t just do this. Dick’s known them almost his whole life. They wouldn’t. 

The wheels in his head start turning, blood rushing at his temples, weight closing in. His first thought is a devastating, catastrophic loss, but when he runs a search for their names, there’s news from at least a few weeks ago for any of them. 

Dick grips his phone like a vice as the realization settles, teeth grinding, catching his tongue and slicing it. It was Bruce then. He knows in his chest that’s the truth. Bruce told them something, Bruce _made_ them not approach. He drops the phone on the bed. 

His carves his nails into the center of his palms.

**_xxxiv._ **

So maybe being inside is making him crazy. 

He’s inspected every single inch of his apartment three times. The only difference is a new dent in the wall by the door and the buckling of the rusted out fire escape. No sign of anybody. No disturbed dust. No items out of place. 

No sign of the Owls. 

Should he lie in wait for the Owls to come find him? So he doesn’t put anybody else in danger? There’s no way of knowing how long that would take, though. Especially since they were rooted in Gotham, based there. Yet they’d been more patient in getting to him after the gunshot than Bruce; they’d had Dr. Haas in place for _ten months_ before they gave him the goggles that unburied and warped his memories. 

He can’t just box himself in an 800 foot studio for another whole year. He can’t let this happen again. He needs this to be done. 

He’ll just have to find them first.

**_xxxv._ **

Dick goes slow at first. A walk down the street. A brief trip to the grocery store. Eyes over his shoulder. 

He keeps his temper cool and his hood down. Wears his dad’s ancient Haly’s ‘Staff’ sweatshirt, the letters so cracked they’re almost illegible. Haly’s is where it began, he thinks. For him. For Cobb.

It’s a message to the Owls, to whoever’s watching: _come and get me._

It’s almost midnight, and they still haven’t come for him as a civilian. He _knows_ they’re watching — they have to be. Don’t they?

Dick wants this to be done. This has to be done. 

He unlocks the layers of defenses around the suit he keeps in his closet. 

**_xxxvi._ **

_God,_ the night is the same. 

Insane, he thinks, how it feels so different in different suits—without the weight of dozens of blades strapped to his chest or the pull of a shroud over his head — to be out with the hot night air rushing past his hair and filling his veins with adrenaline, with euphoria. 

Bludhaven’s smoke and constant rainy clouds and bright neon lights make the sky a smudge of black-gray haze with no stars to speak of and the air is thick as anything but it’s the same and it’s his city. 

He whoops with laughter that startles him when he dips over the side of a skyscraper in the financial district. He’d forgotten how _much_ he— 

There’s a shift twenty meters back—the weight of eyes on his back—there’s someone there’s someone there’s someone. 

He can feel it. He knows it. 

Dick stays where he is, rewinding his grappling rope silently, knowing the person is on the rooftop behind him. He braces for Cobb’s voice—the _Richard_ that he knows will come, the _what have you done_ that he will feel in the strings of his chest — and he prepares to dodge a throwing knife when he hears it whistle. None comes. 

Instead the voice says, “Nightwing?” and Dick spins around with his jaw dropped.

“...Damian?”

**_xxxvii._ **

_“Baby,”_ says Dick, because that’s his _kid._

Damian runs to him in a leap, squeezes his arms around Dick’s neck, and Dick pulls him off the ground, holding him tight to his chest and burying his head in his kid’s shoulder, cheek against his hair. Damian’s face is hot in the crook of his neck, and damp. 

“God,” chokes Dick. “God. Damian, I—”

“You’re back?”

“I’m back.”

Damian squeezes his arms tighter. He’s heavier, now—older, Dick missed a birthday, didn’t he. What else has he missed? The resentment and rushing, pulsing anger fled for now, replaced with a hum. God. Damian’s face is really damp where it touches the part of Dick’s throat that his costume doesn’t cover. 

He sets Damian down and tilts his chin up with one hand to look—carefully, _carefully_ , so he doesn’t accidentally hurt him because of the mess that is his brain. 

Dick starts when the dim light hits it. It’s not only tears. “Damian—” 

Damian slaps his hand away, pressing his bleeding, only partially clotted cheek into his shoulder so Dick can’t touch it. “It’s nothing.” Then he looks up at Dick, hands knotting together. “You remember me?” he asks after a moment, voice small. 

“I remember you,” Dick assures him softly. “How could anyone forget the world’s greatest Cheese Viking player?”

Damian huffs, but it’s pleased, and he opens his mouth to say something, but Dick cuts him off. 

“What happened to your face? Why didn’t Alfred take care of it?”

Damian shifts, “I came here as soon as I got an alert from the motion sensors in your apartment. I was with the Titans.”

Dick takes a second to process that. Pride, for Damian working with others. Brief confusion: “Sensors?”

“I installed them after you...after you left the Manor that night. I thought you might head to your apartment for refuge so I went there first.”

“I didn’t remember even _having_ an apartment.” Dick shakes his head, mouth twisting. “You put them by the door?”

“And painted over them, in case someone saw.”

Smart kid. Dick huffs out a soft laugh. “I’m glad you felt at liberty to paint my apartment,” he teases, running a hand through Damian’s hair and ruffling it, which his brother doesn’t resist for once.

“Tt. I’ve paid for it longer than you have. I’m entitled to do whatever I want there.”

Dick tries not to freeze at the admission. “You did?” he asks, strained. “All by yourself?’

Damian’s cheeks flush. “I own two islands. It was hardly expensive, Richard.”

“No names in the field, Robin,” Dick says instinctively, and then pauses, chest tight, before he hugs Damian again, the boy instantly reciprocating and burrowing into his chest, arms circling him like a vice. 

“You said my name first,” Damian mumbles into Dick’s ribcage, knocking his head like a bull but not letting go, only half-playing at being sullen. Dick lets out a laugh and tries not to cry. 

Before he speaks, he glances at his surroundings one last time. Still nothing. They must be watching from afar. That makes it no less dangerous, and Dick bites the inside of his cheek before he bites the bullet and calls it a night. The Court won’t be lured out tonight.

“Come on,” Dick says. “Let’s go get you patched up.”

  
  



	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> bruce kool-aid mans through sensitive emotional conflicts. so, like, a regular friday.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> omg i forgot exactly where i was going with this fic but dick goes off in this chapter so i wanted to post it

**_xxxviii._ **

“Not Iodine,” Damian protests when he sees Dick return from the medicine cabinet with an opened bottle and a pad of gauze after putting away his suture materials, neck craning as he leans away from Dick. 

“Yes Iodine,” Dick says, and presses the antiseptic to Damian’s cheek. The boy hisses. The edge of Dick’s mouth pulls while he huffs, and he makes an effort to be gentler. “Maybe if you’d dressed the wound before you got here—” 

Damian scrunches his nose at the sting, looking to the side. His leg kicks out from where he sits on the countertop in a reflex. 

“I acted _in haste,_ Richard. There was no time.”

Dick hums, throws out the amber, betadine-covered gauze and covers the wound with a clean one. 

“You take the Batplane all the way from California?”

Damian can’t resist the urge to preen; he shifts. “Of course.”

“Then you could’ve put it on autopilot and taken care of this,” Dick says instantly, cuffing him upside the chin, the back of his fingers accidentally brushing Damian’s neck, and Dick tries not to show it, but he freezes. It’s the motion of it—the familiarity. That little girl, the mayor’s daughter, whose throat he almost slit. Four years old. 

That was just hours ago. How long? 18 hours? 20? He balls his fingers into a fist, hands dropping to his side abruptly, away from Damian. He takes a step back, and gathers the betadine back up for an excuse to turn around and walk away. He puts it back in the cabinet and stares at the bottle, nestled between a set of trauma shears and white rolls of gauze. He shuts his eyes.

He is aware of every ounce of blood in his veins. The pushing. The pulling.

Damian’s gaze is heavy on his back. 

Dick swallows. 

“When was the last time you slept?” Dick manages at last, turning and shutting the cabinet door with stiff hands and open eyes. 

“When was the last time _you_ slept?”

Night before last. In his cab. Slept like a baby. Unaware a murder-cult had been playing doctor with his brain, that the next night he’d be getting fifteen years of false memories overlaid in his head. That he’d be getting real ones too. 

“You don’t get to use diversions on me. I’m the master of diversions. I invented diversions,” Dick says, chest already falling back into place.

“Hmph,” Damian says. “Wednesday.”

“Bed or couch,” Dick asks, even though he knows Damian will have the same answer he always does, which is—

“Couch.”

The pressure building in his throat gives a little, and his heart hurts with the force of his fondness. His...relief.

Some things never change. He’s thankful for that.

That sort of question is the way you always have to deal with Damian. You have to give him options, a choice. He listens to orders when he has to—and there are plenty of _have-tos_ in Gotham, too many—but Dick knows how to frame it when it isn’t. You have to give him some sort of control.

They’re a lot alike that way. 

Dick ends up yanking the comforter off of his bed and throwing it on top of Damian, who is sprawled over the couch like he owns it and has to scrabble the fabric to be able to escape the weight of the bedspread and go brush his teeth. 

Dick is flipping through channels to find some sort of white noise 3am comedy special for his brother to sleep through and him to have something to think about all night when Damian reemerges from the bathroom with a scowl, nose wrinkled. 

“Your toothpaste is expired.”

“What? Let me see.” Dick lowers the remote, heads to the bathroom. He didn’t know toothpaste _could_ expire. 

It is. The expiration date is clear as anything. October 30 last year. Toothpaste comes out when he squeezes it, but it’s hardened like wet chalk and it comes apart along the countertop. It’s there—in the bathroom, glancing into the mirror over the sink—that he gets his first look at himself in the mirror. It stops him in his tracks. 

He holds up a hand to see if the reflection will too because for a moment he can’t believe that’s really him, but the mirror man raises his hand too. Dick sucks in a tense breath. 

In the mirror, his cheeks are drawn in. Skin waxy. His hair is too short to meet his eyebrows in the fringe he usually wears, but it’s long enough in the back that it touches his neck in a way that he hates. It’s stupid. But he _hates_ the tickling feeling of it there where it doesn’t belong. 

Frustrated, he pushes the front of his hair over to one side with a hand, exposing the skin it covered: narrow, scarred-over streaks of silver-brown flesh. New. He never had a scar there before, never got a scar there in any barfight or brawl with the Nightwings as Ric, so where is this—?

He flashes back to being in the car with Alphonse. The talons of his gloves had cut deep grooves here when he was trying to change into Sap’s set of spare clothes. He shifts. 

It shouldn’t have healed yet. It should be scabbed over by now, but not healed into a faded gray scar like this is. Something is—wrong. 

His jaw tightens.

Then Dick clicks his teeth and steps out of the bathroom, determined not to think about it. 

“I’ll buy a new one in the morning,” Dick tells Damian faintly, and sits down on the cold laminate floor by the couch-turned-bed his brother is in, tucking his arms around his knees, head pounding. Damian picks a documentary on whooping cranes, and they sit in silence for a long time between cuts of the narrator’s elegant voice and the hums of a too-emotional score. Then the silence breaks.

“Richard,” says Damian. Pause. “It was—I didn’t mean to— _you_ were—” 

Pause.

“I know,” Dick says quietly, chin pressed into his chest. A black bear kills a crane onscreen, great jaw snapping around its thin white throat. He curls his fingers into sweatshirt, and his mouth twists. “You too, kiddo.”

**_xxxix._ **

Damian is asleep before the credits. Dick lets them play until the screen goes black. 

Sometime during what’s left of the night, rain comes down, thunder rolling in the dark sky. He can imagine loops of white lightning hitting the black, slick wharf just three blocks down. By morning it’s softened into light rain. He steps out of his apartment near dawn and looks at the misty sky and the wet, gray sidewalk covered in thin black worms. He doesn’t get to sleep.

**_xl._ **

Dick keeps an eye on the front window and the door throughout breakfast. 

He has it in his head somehow that Cobb is going to rip it off its hinges and storm in. Maybe put another bomb in Damian’s head. Say, You know where you’re going where you belong _who_ you belong to. Drag him back to the Court for good. 

But he doesn’t.

The closest thing to it is when a pigeon tries to fly through the window and fails. It’s remarkably peaceful.

Damian is recounting the events of the last year between bites of fruit that Dick hands to him. They’ve gotten to October, and there have been more than a few mentions of a girl named Djinn and remarkably few of Jon. Dick doesn’t say anything, just cuts through the apple in his hands and raises his eyebrows encouragingly from time to time. 

Then he catches a hint of movement from the door—the silver doorknob tilts to the side exactly once, a surprising courtesy, a warning Dick knows well but doesn’t process immediately, before the door itself swings open in one wide arc, revealing a haggard-looking white man with dark eyes. 

Dick’s heart skips a beat. His hands tighten around the knife in his grip, let the blade slip closer into his palm. Then he pushes it back up, slices through the apple again, calmly places the slice into Damian’s outstretched hand. 

Dick clears his throat, looking up at the intruder. “Bruce.”

“Dick.”

Bruce stands there, imposing form taking up most of the rectangular doorway, but he doesn’t _look_ imposing right now so much as he looks...unkempt. There’s a long, red slit up his left brow, his hair is greasy, and there’s no umbrella in his hands, which explains why he’s dripping wet. Over his soggy, black turtleneck he’s wearing a pilled blazer that Alfred would never let him out of the house in. He must have been in a rush to look as he does now: all years-old old cashmere, all soaked from the rain. 

Dick’s throat tightens, and his gaze drops back to his hands as he cuts another slice of the apple for Damian, handing it to him silently. Pressure is building in his skull again.

“You miss me?” he asks with a little too much force for the playful tone he was trying for, voice peaking as he drives the knife back under the yellow skin of the apple. 

Bruce doesn’t answer, and Dick can feel the weight of his gaze on him like cinderblocks. 

_Just say it,_ Dick thinks bitterly, and as if on cue, Bruce does: 

“You remember.”

The champagne bottle. The yellow blade at Bruce’s throat, the words stuck in Dick’s. The smear of his teeth as they fell together. The pride he felt. The blood. 

The knife stops again. He looks up. 

“Everything,” Dick says.

Bruce stares at him with his thin, gray eyes. 

“Richard,” Damian interrupts, and just like that, the tension dissolves like it was never there at all. “This slice is _bruised.”_

“Unacceptable, my sincerest apologies,” Dick mocks after a tense beat, when he’s able to speak again, because this is something he can deal with. Damian shoves him hard in the should at the gibe, making him bump into the counter. The sharp cement corner digs into his hip. Dick pushes him away with a flat palm, squishing the boy’s forehead, but he is conscious, too conscious, of Bruce’s watchful gaze. “How can they be bruised, even, I picked them all out yesterday.”

“I don’t care what happened yesterday. See for yourself.” 

He throws the apple slice at Dick, who catches it in one hand and tosses a half-second, extremely familiar look up at Bruce— _can you believe this kid?_ —but his playfulness falters when he looks down. 

“Huh,” he mutters. It’s sunken brown with the impressions of fingers. “...You...must have grabbed it too hard. Little monster. You’re going to eat me out of house and home.”

“Tch,” says Damian, eyes narrowed up at Dick, but then he tucks himself firmly under Dick’s arm and mimics his earlier stance by bracing his arms against the counter. 

He knocks his head against Dick’s ribs, occasionally, probably just to be obnoxious, just so Damian can remind him that he is there, just to say _Don’t forget me._

Bruce is still watching.

He cuts to the core, and that’s the end of the apple. With no more distractions to look at he’s forced to meet Bruce’s gaze. Dick forces a smile—soft, and dimpled, and practiced. 

Bruce’s eyes flicker. He knows. 

So Dick rushes, falling over his own words, to say something earnest enough, emotional enough to trip Bruce up as well. 

“I missed you too, B.” Pause. “Not that I knew I missed you, of course.”

Bruce stares at him.

The silence saturates the room. Dick lets it. 

He keeps his expression neutral, but the throb of his skull and the simmering resentment building in his chest makes it hard. He sets the knife into the sink, curling and uncurling his suddenly tense fingers as he does. 

Dick says, “Damian. Kiddo. I think there’s some worms outside on the pavement. You want to go get them before someone steps on them and they get crushed?”

Bruce and Dick watch in silence as Damian hastens to the window, brow furrowed, fogging up the wet glass for a moment with his hitched breath. Dick doesn’t know for a fact that they’re still there, but they were when Dick looked out at the wet city at dawn and nobody in this part of Bludhaven’s good enough to move them. They must be, because Damian’s face goes resolute and he leaves with his shoulders squared like he’s on a mission. 

The door closes with a _click._ Dick tenses as he waits for the sound that indicates it’s locked. Hears it. Readies himself.

“That was the weakest diversion I’ve heard from you since you were fifteen.”

 _Watch your step,_ he wants to tell Bruce. He bites the inside of his cheek instead. 

“It works, though. Cause it’s him. That’s the only reason.” 

“...Hm,” says Bruce, and he says it like _that,_ and Dick says, “What? _What?_ What can you possibly want from me right now? What have I done wrong now, you can’t cut me some slack, I got a bullet to the head and people in my brain, and I’m not allowed to—”

Dick stops himself. At some point he must have stood up because he’s nose to nose with Bruce, breathing in the same air, the musty scent that bites into expensive fabric as soon as it gets wet. Dick’s chest’s heaving. His tongue tastes thick. There’s pounding in his head. He curls his fingers into his palm. 

“Are you,” Bruce says, and stops.

“Am I.”

“Alfred—Alfred worried about you.”

They’re back to the classics now. Alfred as an excuse, a stand-in because Bruce is too afraid to ever say what he means, what he wants. Alfred wanted you to start on your homework, Alfred wanted you to stay back from patrol, Alfred wanted you to bring a jumper, Alfred wanted you to see this casefile from 1998 because he knew you’d like it. 

Dick used to think it was endearing. He liked knowing where and how to step exactly right because it was like he had won the puzzle. He used to be proud that he had the only key to the fucking padlock that was Bruce Wayne. 

“Was he the only one?” Dick says.

“No.”

Dick says, “I saw him, and I saw Barbara, and I never saw you.”

“You ran away.”

“You showed me a video of myself getting _shot!”_ Dick shouts, hands on his own collarbone. “Before I even knew who I was! You couldn’t wait five minutes for me to be home before or recover before—”

“I needed you,” Bruce says, quietly, eyes dark. “I needed you.”

The door cracks open and Damian busts in, black hair wet with raindrops and plastered to his forehead, cheeks slightly red and eyes triumphant. Dick watches as his excited expression and motions slowly fade while he takes in the scene, Bruce and Dick at each other’s throats—the hard line between Bruce’s brow and the way that Dick’s fists won’t stop shaking—and seconds slow into years before he closes the door with a quiet click. 

“Father?” starts Damian tremulously. 

“We’re going home,” Bruce says firmly, and he looks Dick dead in the eye while he says it. “All of us.”

A little laugh escapes Dick’s throat, and he steps back, the spell broken. The fight was useless. Is useless. He should have known—Dick has known Bruce longer than he hasn’t, has put up with him longer than anybody except Alfred. There’s no excuse. He should have known. 

“You never learn, Bruce,” Dick says softly, like he’s speaking to a child. “You never change.”


End file.
